Course Descriptions

This course provides an introduction to intersectional feminist scholarship and an examination of social constructions of gender, race, and sexuality and how they are shaped by particular contexts, times, and places. We will explore the ways that intersecting and hierarchical relations of power, privilege, and marginalization are reproduced and how they shape social arrangements and everyday lives. In this course, students will engage critically with major issues, debates, and politics in feminist scholarship and activism through a social justice lens. Course readings and scholarship include gender studies, indigenous feminisms, trans studies, critical race studies, sexuality studies and queer theory, media and literary studies, and theories of the body. As well, we will read a variety of genres including academic scholarship, fiction, blogs, graphic novels, and essays.

This course will focus on the ways that contemporary feminist debates are reproduced and understood in media, popular culture, and social media. For example, what do feminist hashtag campaigns on Twitter contribute to discussions of social justice? How is feminism represented on sites like Tumblr or Instagram? How might we use social media effectively as a tool for social change? In exploring these various means of expression and activism, we will attempt to answer the question: how can we understand social justice in a social media world?

An interdisciplinary and cross-cultural overview of contemporary environmental issues, as they relate to gender equality and social justice challenges and initiatives that respond to ecological crises.

Since at least the 19th century, the canon of literature in English has, with some exceptions, functioned as a sacred archive for conditioning imperial attitudes, and for shaping universal “genius” as inescapably white and masculine. Even today 80% of the literary publishing industry is managed by self-identifying white publishers and editors. How have people of color, women, and queer folk intervened within this troubled tradition? How did they write of themselves when their livelihoods had become unspeakable?
This course traces intersectional themes in literary production focusing on representations of racial, gender, and sexual difference, within a context of liberal multiculturalism, which is to say a context of empire. We will explore texts by minority authors to understand how they open us to marginalized histories concerning slavery, coolie migration, transgender and queer oppression, and indigenous colonization. We will first look at the literary interventions of writers like Virginia Woolf, Sui Sin Far, and Nella Larsen; then we will understand how autobiographical stories broke through the boundaries of literary culture through the writings of Harriet Jacobs, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Maggie Nelson; lastly we will look at queer of color speculative fiction by Octavia Butler, Samuel Delaney, and Larissa Lai.

In the introduction to Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, Walidah Imarisha says that “whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction. All organizing is science fiction. Organizers and activists dedicate their lives to creating and envisioning another world, or many other worlds.” Likewise, writers of science fiction and fantasy create other worlds; worlds that imagine a future of global transformation, a future free from oppression and marginalization. Like social justice movements, science fiction and fantasy offer us the possibility for change and the promise of revolution.

This course will explore the connections between science fiction, fantasy, young adult literature and feminist, social justice activism. How can social justice movements benefit from reading science fiction and fantasy from an intersectional feminist perspective? In answering this question, we will look at the characteristics of science fiction and fantasy and define the genres in relation to intersectional feminism. We will then explore the popularity of science fiction and fantasy in film and television by exploring series and films such as Bladerunner, Westworld, The 100, Sense8, Orphan Black, and Game of Thrones.

GRSJ 224B (002)GRSJ 224B (002): Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice in Literature - Young Adult Fiction and Social Justice: Stories for Changing the World

The genre of young adult fiction has grown in popularity in recent years and has become perhaps one of the most diverse and important genres of literature to focus on social justice issues. Along with successful television adaptations and film franchises, the appeal and significance of young adult fiction can’t be ignored.

This course will explore the common social justice themes in young adult fiction with a focus on contemporary literature and their adaptations. These themes include: gender identity and expression, friendship, coming of age, race and racism, technology, immigration, environmental justice, transphobia, xenophobia, reproductive justice, and dystopias.

In her work on female rebellion in dystopian fiction, Sarah Day suggests that young adult literature represent the liminal spaces of growing up, where coming of age means moving from childhood to adulthood but also brings about possibilities for other changes and explorations: the possibility to change yourself and the possibility to change the world.

We will explore how these liminal spaces in young adult fiction relate to contemporary feminist and social justice issues and how this genre provides hope and inspiration for a new generation of social justice activists.

In this year-long course we will examine the history of the fairy tale across cultures, read some traditional tales, and consider the representation of gender, sexuality, and race in contemporary fairy tales from an intersectional feminist perspective and with a focus on decolonizing knowledge about storytelling and fairy-tale scholarship. Together we will address the variety and complexities of themes, narratives and cultural issues that are constructed and represented in the genre of fairy tales and explore how fairy tales can effectively be used in a feminist, social justice classroom.

Readings will include a selection of essays and articles from feminist and fairy-tale scholarship, a variety of traditional fairy tales, and fairy-tale retellings from contemporary authors such as Angela Carter, Nalo Hopkinson, Emma Donoghue, Helen Oyeyemi, Francesca Lia Block, Kim Addonizio, Julia Alvarez, Midori Snyder and Malinda Lo. We will also examine some fairy-tale films (including Disney) and fairy-tale television in relation to their literary counterparts.

As well, we will explore the use of fairy motifs in popular culture, film, and television taking vampires as a case study and using examples from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, and various reworkings of Dracula.

Course assignments include blog posts, academic speed dating, a research proposal and paper, and the option for creative projects.

Critically engaging with novels and films from the last twenty-five years that examine love, sex and violence and transgression. Our texts will focus on gender and sexuality, and race, social justice and their representations. We will delve into love and hate and the redemptive role of art. Love has the power to make us feel extraordinarily happy and utterly devastated. Why? What is love, and why does it have this power over us?

We will examine affective questions about sensation, fear, disgust, and shock; and problems of torture, pain, and the unrepresentable. We will ask whether these texts help us understand violence, or whether they frame violence as something that resists comprehension; we will consider whether form mitigates or colludes with violence.

The dragon lady; the Asian geek; the martial artist; the exotic Asian prostitute; the puerile brown boy; the robotic Asian; the new Asian rich. These racial types insistently reappear in all mediums: literature, film, television, and even video games. How and why have these stereotypes persisted, some for over a century, despite the progress of multiculturalism and transpacific relations?
This course will understand how representations of Asia and Asiatic bodies have developed and shifted over time within shifting contexts of migration, war, neocolonization, neoliberal capitalism/modernization, the modern war on terror, and multicultural “progress.” This course will include readings of film, literature, and video games, focusing on 1) theories of Orientalism and exoticism, 2) understandings of Asian queerness focusing on narratives of travel and migration, and 3) contemporary theories of techno-Orientalism and “Digital Asia.”

Instructor: Dr. Chris Patterson

GRSJ 235GRSJ 235 - Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Structures in Modern Asia

In many queer and minority communities in Asia, “identity politics” and “queer politics” have been recast as extensions of Western empire, to instead prefer more local and organic forms of resistance that are informed by North American politics, but refuse to see them as universal. What can an intersectional approach teach us about how racial, gendered, and sexual difference are recast and restructured in the crossovers of Asia and North America? How do we envision “Asia” without succumbing to contemporary stereotypes that see Asian cultures as overrun by patriarchy, racial nationalism, and capitalist fetishization?

This course seeks to confront the multiple discourses of marginality in Asia and North America by focusing on the imperial regimes that have helped propagate racist and hetero-patriarchal structures. We will first try to understand post-Cold War Asia through the works of Chen Kuan-Hsing, James C. Scott, Lisa Lowe, and others. We will then look at the overlapping regimes of tourism, sex work, and militarism, which Teresia Teaiwa has called “militourism.” Finally we will focus on the contemporary phenomenon of female migratory domestic work coming from India, The Philippines, Indonesia, and Micronesia.

Today’s discourses of otherness often conjure images of suffering, with phrases like “victims” and “oppressed minorities” used to characterize any group that upsets racial, gendered and sexual norms. Yet even as queer and non-white communities carry histories of colonial and state violence, their identities are not subsumed into discourses of victimhood, but have been creatively reimagined through vernacular and often unspoken artforms found within popular culture: hip hop, punk, strip tease, camp, independent cinema, and indie video games. How does popular culture allow us to rethink mainstream discourses of marginalization and intersectionality? What does it mean to resist gendered norms through flourishing, playing, and living well?

This course explores the queering of gender, racial and sexual norms through intersectional “low theories” that privilege the quirky, the playful, the reparative, the silly, and the perverse. We will pair readings from thinkers like Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, Eve Sedgwick, José Muñoz, and Judith Halberstam, with popular culture forms like music (David Bowie, Riot grrrl, Against Me!), movies (Paris Is Burning, My Little Laundrette), and video games (Gone Home, Lim, Alien: Isolation). By meandering through the mess of queer (and queered) popular art, we will pursue new ways to creatively reimagine ourselves and the world around us.

Instructor: Dr. Chris Patterson

GRSJ 301GRSJ 301: Gender, Race & Indigeneity in Canada

In this course, we will engage the history, politics, and literature of Indigenous Feminisms, Queer Studies, Two-Spirit Studies, and Masculinities in Canada and throughout Indigenous North America through scholarly texts, film, personal narratives, and fiction.

Instructor: TBA

GRSJ 303GRSJ 303: Gender, Law, and Social Justice

A survey of feminist legal thought and recent developments in feminism and law, with a focus on Canada.

GRSJ 306GRSJ 306: Globalization and Social Justice: Gender, Race, and Sexuality in International Politics

What were the factors that sparked the Occupy Wall Street and Idle No More movements? How have communities and organisations mobilized to protest against discrimination based upon gender, sexuality, race or cultural identity?

This course will examine how the concepts of law and social justice are deployed within the framework of globalization and whether they are effective vehicles to achieve change or, as Douzinas suggests, they have been co-opted as ‘tools of public power and individual desire’ that actually work against marginalized and oppressed communities. Focusing upon the role of social movements we will consider what mechanisms and strategies are deployed to challenge structural and hegemonic oppression from a range of perspectives.

To what extent do the media lead or follow trends in popular culture? The emphasis in the course is on examining cultural artifacts as artistic objects seen in the light of various socio-political contexts. Cultural analysis will be studied to connect what’s ‘popular’ to what’s going on in our society. By taking a closer look at the movies and television shows you are watching, the clothes you are wearing, and the music you listen to, students will endeavour to understand the role of popular culture in maintaining and reproducing the kind of society we live in. We will explore the ways in which each of us is both a user of and is used by popular culture. Popular culture is all around us, influencing how we think, how we feel, how we relate, how we live our lives in countless ways. This course will use your own expertise as consumers of popular culture as a take-off point for exploring the various roles played by mass-mediated popular culture in our lives. We will look primarily at television, film, advertising, and popular music, with occasional forays into other types of pop culture. We will analyze how such critical factors as ethnicity, race, gender, class, age, and sexuality are shaped by and reshaped in popular culture.

GRSJ 310 takes a social justice approach to issues in gender, race and health. It examines the contributions of social justice theories, as sites of academic and activist inquiry, to health research, and focuses on topics such as biopower and reproduction, midwifery and institutionalized medicine, violence and health inequalities, the medicalization the body, racism and access to health services, sexuality and power, and representational politics.

In the first seven weeks, we will examine “the body” as a topic of inquiry and study, focusing on the role of Western science and medicine in regulating bodies, discussing the rise of biopolitics and biopower, and examining the social determinants of health. These topics will introduce you to the course’s two major intertwined questions of inquiry: first, what is health, and how is it related to power and regulation? And second, how do gender and other intersecting social processes/social locations including sexuality, poverty, racialization, colonialism and geographic location influence health? From there, we will turn to two specific “case studies” to further and more deeply examine theoretical approaches to health inequities: 1) reproductive health and politics 2) cancer activism and politics.

"…black matters are spatial matters. The displacement of difference, geographic domination, transatlantic slavery, and the black Atlantic Ocean differently contribute to mapping out the real and imaginative geographies of black women; they are understood here as social processes that make geography a racial-sexual terrain" (Katherine McKittrick, 2006, Demonic grounds, p. xiv).

This course is an interdisciplinary survey of African/Black women in the Americas; it begins from the historic triangular trade which dispersed large numbers of African women in captivity and continues to the present. The term African/Black is used to denote both the continent of original identities and the racialized transformation of identities under slavery.

This course examine how this history has led to the presence of African/Black women across the Atlantic - in Canada, Britain, the Caribbean, the U.S. and Africa. Drawing from critical race and feminist scholarship, cultural studies and sociology, the materials consider how history, economic conditions, geography, class, and culture shape African/Black women’s lives within and across historical and national boundaries/borders. Some of the themes/issues examined include: enslavement and colonialism, black female embodiment, black sexual politics, sites of memory, the legacies of the past in the present, representation, and sport.

This course encourages students to explore the complexity, diversity and politics of African/Black women's lives so that we might develop a more dynamic and complicated understanding of these women and their struggles for autonomy and dignity and their roles as both producers of knowledge and agents of resistance and transformation.

This course is concerned with tracing how the production of the queer subject – in popular discourse, community formation, political struggle and academic theorizing – takes place within contemporary and historical conditions of white supremacy, settler colonialism and global capitalism. It is thus interested in queer and trans of colour theorizing as a mode of scholarly inquiry and as a political project. Along with examining the ways that the governance of gender and sexuality is entwined with the imperial, capitalist and nationalist production of racial difference at various political scales, we will also examine the racial and imperial contours of contemporary understandings of the ‘sexual’ writ large, including mainstream and subaltern discourses of love, desire, intimacy, beauty and kinship.

Our three main tasks will be as follows:
- To analyze the scholarly and political foundations of queer and trans of colour theorizing, including its genealogical linkages to women of colour feminisms, its critiques of white normativity in queer politics and theorizing, and its engagement with cisheteronormativity in critical race studies and ethno-racial community organizing
- To examine queer and trans of colour theorizing’s complicated relationship with settler colonialism and settler colonial studies, including the gender and sexual politics of colonialism and imperialism and indigenous thinkers’ contributions to and departures from queer and trans of colour scholarship and politics
- To put queer and trans of colour theorizing in conversation with critical studies of nation, citizenship, diaspora and empire, including asking to what extent the former has engaged questions of mobilities, borders, nationalisms, migrations, transnationalisms and imperialisms in its examination of the nexus of racial, sexual and gender politics

This 3-credit third-year course introduces students to data collection techniques, the politics of interpretation, and the formulation of a research proposal using a feminist, anti-racist framework.

Instructor: Kalbir, Heer

GRSJ 326GRSJ 326: The Politics of Gender, Families, and Nation-Making

Our three-credit course interrogates two major social institutions: the ‘family’ and the ‘state’. Here, our focus is twentieth and twenty-first century Canada and the United States, with some integration of cross-cultural studies. We examine feminist anti-racist research on families under settler colonialism, neo-liberal state formation, hetero-gendered and racial nationalisms, and late capitalist consumerism. Rather than a private, personal realm, family has been, and continues to be penetrated by state and extra-state discourses and practices of ruling and social organization. For instance, legacies of colonization, racist, sexist, and heterosexist state policies of inclusion & exclusion haunt and shape quests for belonging, ‘home’, intimacy, and citizenship rights, both formal and substantive.

Interdisciplinay course readings are drawn from sociology, anthropology, Indigenous studies, geography, gender and sexuality studies, history, law, and social work. We probe the privileging of what sociologist Dorothy E. Smith terms the post WW II ‘Standard North American Family’ (SNAF): the white middle class, monogamous, cis-gendered, consumption-oriented, hetero-nuclear family with children. At the same time, we examine the diversity of Indigenous, single parent-led, non-Anglo/immigrant, queer, trans, and transnational families. We interrogate institutions and (often contradictory) discourses of intimacy, marriage, mothering, fathering, parenting, childcare, unpaid and paid household labour, and migrant domestic work globally. Assignments include a mid-term exam, short outline, auto-ethnography research paper, small-group seminar presentation, and in-class discussion. We acknowledge that our course meets on the ancestral, unceded, and occupied territory of the Musqueam Nation.

GRSJ 327GRSJ 327: Feminist Theories of Representation and Difference - The Difference that Feminisms Make

In a 1982 speech at Harvard University, the preeminent Black feminist scholar Audre Lorde powerfully noted that “[t]here is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives”. This course will examine the very question of difference as a productive, if painful, point of contention in spaces of feminist theorizing and organizing. Our focus will be on the expansive feminist politics of Black, Indigenous, Latinx and Asian scholars and activists, and their contributions to our understandings of the production and politics of racial, gender and sexual difference as well as the institutions, ideologies and practices that sustain them.

Taking a broad historical approach, we will revisit earlier interventions by Black, Indigenous, Latinx and Asian feminist thinkers, paying particular attention to the challenges they posed to the epistemological, methodological and political projects of mainstream feminism. We will re-examine feminist debates about history, voice, positionality, representation, knowledge, visibility, emotion, desire and agency, along with feminist engagements with imperial, national and capitalist projects of citizenship, rescue and violence. In revisiting these earlier conversations, this course also aims to mine them for the lessons they offer towards a critical appraisal of the current state of feminist thought and organizing. They also thus open up an opportunity to examine what is at stake in a contemporary moment when (certain forms of) feminist politics continue to become part of the language of the state, the academy and the market.

Rene Descartes’ cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”) elevates the primacy of the thinking individual, whose knowledge is self-evident, as the model of the Western liberal subject. This course queers the Cartesian subject, historically read as white and male, by insisting that his individualism masks his embeddedness in socio-historical relations and by asking questions about the kinds of knowledge that are privileged as his defining feature.

This course asks what can be gained by reading the production of the Cartesian subject alongside and through historical and contemporary practices of imperialism, patriarchy, capitalism, racism, colonialism, cis-heteronormativity and ableism. ‘Disturbing subjectivities’ is thus the focus of the course: disturbing in both its adjectival and verb forms. Five substantive modules, each focused on a ‘disturbing subject’ vis-à-vis the Cartesian ideal, serve to structure the course. They include: the settler, the child, the trans* person, the criminal and the more-than-human. A consideration of each of these subjects – and how they relate to each other – will offer the opportunity to examine the place of normalization, abjection, power, violence and the state in the production of subjects.

Along with engaging with scholarly texts, lectures and news articles on these subjects, students will also produce writings that reflect on the production of their own subjectivities through their own relations to and encounters with these ‘disturbing subjects’. This course is also, thus, an opportunity for students to consider how they come to know themselves as subjects through their embeddedness in uneven social, political and historical worlds.

This course will address the ways that the body is rendered monstrous through discourses of misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and racism with a focus on representations of monstrous bodies in literature, film, and popular culture. The readings are loosely themed around concepts of reproduction in three ways: 1) an examination of the ways in which reproduction and reproductive politics are represented in fiction and film; 2) an exploration of monstrous bodies in textual reproductions; 3) a critical analysis of the posthuman monster and its reproduction through technology, media, and popular culture. We will read and analyze a number of novels, short stories, speculative fiction, science fiction, horror, and young adult fiction, watch a number of films and excerpts from television, and read a variety of feminist scholarship.

In this course, students will map the intersections between colonialism, race and the development of non-secular feminist thought and praxis. The course begins with a challenge to the secular/non-secular binary within western feminist thought as a bi-product of coloniality. We will not only survey feminist traditions and categories of analysis within the Abrahamic religions and beyond, but we will also be historicizing feminist categories of analysis such as maternity/the Mother in religion, emancipation of women and the divine feminine. Students will explore, and experiment with various feminist and de-colonial methodologies from the Abrahamic traditions to learn the dynamic and contested ways in which religious (con)texts are transformed into feminist meanings, to empower women as makers and authors of the Divine. A discussion of religious feminisms must be rooted in an intersectional framework in which we ask the difficult questions of how the Abrahamic religions, including their feminist traditions, have been complicit in colonialism, and what pathways Islamic, Christian and Jewish feminist thought and praxis share in the work of justice. One critical aspect of the course will be examining the stories, archives and accounts of how religion was understood and practiced by women living within contexts of institutionalized slavery and colonialism, and how contemporary religious feminists respond to these intersecting histories of violence.. Although this course focuses primarily on the Abrahamic traditions of faith, we will also be bridging our conversations with the traditions and (con)texts of Sikhism, Indigenous religions in Africa and North-America, among others. The aim of this course is to widen, expand and layer our understandings of how what religious feminism means and the role it plays in contemporary struggles.

This course takes Black/African movements and struggles for humanity and self-definition as a starting point and template for examining a diversity of Critical Racial and Anticolonial Feminist struggles. Anti-colonialist and critical race theories and practices represent a variety of oppositional discourses to colonialism and its continued state and structural after-effects. That is, we witness and experience racial disparities and disproportionalities in everyday life especially in lives of racialized and indigenous peoples in areas such as education, the carceral system and employment). The current state violence and oppression need critical and intersectional analyses.

With a focus on North America, we shall examine the ways in which Black women have worked to undo the deleterious effects of imperialism and a colonial past in a white supremacist present. This political work for racial justice may take a variety of alternative forms. Thus, the notions of political work, and anticolonial work need to be broadened. As we imagine a more just and compassionate society, we shall examine the ways in which this social justice work varies along the intersectional dimensions such as class, sexuality, nationality, religion, disability, in formal institutions and organizations and grassroots struggles.

This course offers a unique experiential learning opportunity to actively engage the connections between anti-colonial and social justice theorizing and activism. Students will draw on the theoretical knowledge they have acquired at UBC to volunteer with a range of diverse community organizations working for socio-political, economic and anti-racist transformation.